Let's Read: "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"

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i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Sigh. The hat was doing so well at being immune to the NPC stupidity field that surrounds Eliezarry.

Now 'If you don't talk to the telepathic hat it can't sort you and it will be sad' blackmail. Then it proceeds to READ HIS MIND not 4 paragraphs later.

How has Harry had time to learn about all of these houses anyway?

# ¿ Apr 15, 2015 05:45

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 13:51

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

quote:

I am not Dark Lord material!

quote:

On the other hand, one competent hedge fundie could probably own the whole wizarding world within a week. Harry filed away this notion in case he ever ran out of money, or had a week free.

quote:

You're mine now, Harry thought at the walls of Diagon Alley, and all the shops and items, and all the shopkeepers and customers; and all the lands and people of wizarding Britain, and all the wider wizarding world; and the entire greater universe of which Muggle scientists understood so much less than they believed. I, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, do now claim this territory in the name of Science.

quote:

"With respect, Mr. Potter, I'm quite sure I don't. Unless - this is just a guess, mind - you're trying to take over the world?"

"No! I mean yes - well, no! "

quote:

Harry cracked his knuckles in determination, but they only made a quiet sort of clicking sound, rather than echoing ominously off the walls of Diagon Alley.

Possibility two: He'd be taking over the world.

Eventually. Perhaps not right away.

That sort of thing did sometimes take longer than two months. Muggle science hadn't gone to the moon in the first week after Galileo.

quote:

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."

quote:

Note to self: Overthrow government of magical Britain at earliest convenience.

quote:

I wonder how difficult it would be to just make a list of all the top blood purists and kill them.

quote:

I don't want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organised."

quote:

"I'd like you to help me take over the universe."

quote:

I am not Dark Lord material!

# ¿ Apr 17, 2015 05:18

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Krotera posted:

All I really want out of this fic is for Harry to get poo poo on and for Harry to stay LessWrong enough to be worth making GBS threads on because otherwise it won't be funny.

Yud and I are on the same side so long as that's what he wants, but unfortunately he only seems interested in doing it for fleeting moments. I think he's making the mistake of assuming Harry is remotely sympathetic, but I can't be sure.

HPMoR is fundamentally a rambling and incoherent mountain of words, posted serially to fanficiton.net over the course of several years without the benefit of editing. Who knows what Yud is thinking as he writes any one chapter, he's probably thinking something completely different a few chapters down the line.

The hat in this chapter is a stand-in for the LessWrong super-intelligent AI, complete with the 'strange goals' analogy lifted from Yud's blog posts about paperclip maximizing AI.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2015 05:47

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

JosephWongKS posted:

Chapter 11
Omake Files 1

If you are writing an English-language story and there are perfectly serviceable English words for the Japanese term, why not just use the English words?

And more importantly, did he actually go off and write fanfiction of his own fanfiction? How self-indulgent do you have to be to do that?

Nah, he's publishing fanficiton other people wrote about his fanfiction. Something of an improvement in writing quality to boot.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2015 04:02

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Nessus posted:

Hilari-tea. Where's my scam sauce fanfic money, internet?

Right here on amazon! http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00E640ZAG

Since March 19th, 4 copies have been sold. After amazon fees it is $8/book in gross sales. Estimating actual shipping fees and vanity press printing, net profit of $2/book.

Extrapolating out, estimate 30-40 sales/year.

This fanfiction thing is highly profitable if you write 50 Shades. Otherwise, not so much.

# ¿ May 3, 2015 21:20

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

# ¿ May 7, 2015 04:43

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Tiggum posted:

He's not concerned for himself though, he's worried for some reason that a cheap novelty item sold openly in public might actually have the power to fundamentally alter reality in catastrophic ways in order to cause surprising events to happen. In this case, he believes that by drinking the comed-tea he made Dumbledore insane, that if he hadn't drank it then Dumbledore's speech would have been completely unremarkable.

It's still dumb, but it's not just that he's worried about embarrassing himself.

So he's worried he made Dumbledore insane by consuming said cheap novelty item after a sample size of one. And after everyone present agreed that Dumbledore's speech was entirely unsurprising. And after avowing to himself that 'he was going to test it experimentally', he declines to test it again at the next opportunity?

Clearly an inquisitive scientific mind, uniquely suited to ~~take over the magical world~~ investigate the magical world through logic and reason.

:eng99:

Moving on to something worth talking about, John Stapp was an amazing human being and should be remembered for his pioneering work on developing safe harnesses and ejection seats. And formulating the wording of Murphy's law we know so well. And for strapping himself on a rocket sled going over 600mph in the name of science. A great writeup here: http://www.ejectionsite.com/stapp.htm. Now with fixed hyperlink!

Best quote:

quote:

When after many months the results of all Stapp's work was presented to the Aero Med Lab brass, they were horrified. Surprisingly, the words "court martial" were never mentioned, perhaps because Stapp had shown such courage. His initiative however was another matter entirely. To reign him in, Stapp was promoted to the rank of major, reminded of the 18 G limit of human survivability, and told to discontinue tests above that level. And he was told in no uncertain terms that human tests had to end. Chimpanzees, his superiors advised, would be acceptable substitutes.

Stapp then proceeded to build a bigger and better rocket sled and strap himself into it.

i81icu812 fucked around with this message at 01:28 on May 16, 2015

# ¿ May 15, 2015 03:23

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

In 88 days we've gone through 12 chapters out of 122 total chapters. At this rate we can look forward to completion on Oct 30, 2017.

# ¿ May 20, 2015 07:36

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

SSNeoman posted:

Hey guys! Do you love stories where nothing of consequence occurs and the protagonist learns no lessons from his misdaventures!?

Then whoah nelly have we got something for you!

hpmor.txt

# ¿ Jun 8, 2015 01:59

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

divabot posted:

Nobody loving knows. This is a question that has been asked repeatedly. But apparently EY knows someone whose hairdresser knows someone whose dealer thought about loving someone who once threw up on the steps of the theatre Radcliffe was working in the previous night, so it's ALL GOOD and PLANS ARE IN MOTION OH YES THEY ARE.

Also in that note, a link to his facebook explaining why his brilliance makes him suited to be an angel investor and therefore people should give him 5 figures to invest on their behalf. He promises 20% returns!

# ¿ Jun 24, 2015 04:27

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

anilEhilated posted:

Yeah, easily the best part of the retrospective posted a bit above was Yud's "note to self: foreshadow less" bit. I guess he was aiming for an even less coherent plot?

Hahahahaahahaha. It's actually the preceding authors note. Oh boy, but it is ever a dozy.

quote:

HPMOR initially went fast, with 365,000 words in 9 months while I was working on other things. My writing then slowed down enormously after Ch. 63. Looking back, I think I made the following mistakes:

The mistake of reading reviews, and letting the pleasure of reading reviews replace the intrinsic reward of writing good text.
The worse mistake of having tried to commit to a schedule for chapters, so that the more addicted readers would stop repeatedly hitting F5 in desperate hope. In retrospect, I think the timed updates were good for those readers, but really really bad for my hedonics.
Trying to upgrade the standards to which I held my writing; thinking of HPMOR as something that other people were holding to standards, rather than as a wacky fanfiction I was doing in my downtime.
Bogging down in all the foreshadowing that had to be fulfilled and the parentheses that needed closing, often involving plot points that I�d developed earlier at a more primitive level of literary skill.

The obvious lessons are that next time, I must:

Hold myself to a lower standard, somehow, even if many people are praising the work as Great Literature and my natural impulse is to try to live up to that.
Not commit to any schedule, just publish things as I feel comfortable with them. Torturing my readers with unpredictability, as much as I don�t enjoy inflicting that particular form of suffering, may be an unavoidable price of my being able to actually write.
Write to a more open-ended plot, where I can just take things where I want them to go; foreshadowing only hidden background facts that can be discovered at any time, not specific future events.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2015 03:47

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Doctor Spaceman posted:

quote:
Big Yud posted:

[I r]ead the first 3 books, watched the next 5 movies, checked the wiki often, and most importantly, read at least a hundred other Harry Potter fanfictions. I know off the top of my head who Fleur Delacour's little sister is, in fact I've read a whole book about her bonding to Harry Potter's ghost after he dies in the Second Task of the Triwizard tournament.

Fanfiction of fanfiction.

i81icu812 fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Jul 13, 2015

# ¿ Jul 13, 2015 05:52

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Kellanved posted:

I think another guy in the field said this stuff in page 1 or something, but we're so far from AGI it's quite hilarious. The cutting edge stuff in machine learning right now at least in computer vision can... assign known class labels to pictures sorta accurately using deep neural networks? Don't get me wrong, there has been some awesome progress in the last decade or so - but I doubt we'll have AGI during my lifetime...

Also, sorta accurately has a very different definition for computer vision researchers. 75% under ideal conditions is really good guys!

# ¿ Jul 22, 2015 01:58

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3737907

Someone is shirking their obligation of reading HPMOR. 500,000 words to go!

# ¿ Aug 23, 2015 06:00

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

i81icu812 posted:

Elizer Yudkowsky posted:
All science mentioned in Methods is standard science except where otherwise specified (IIRC, the only two uses of nonstandard theories are Barbour�s timeless physics in Ch. 28 and my own timeless decision theory in Ch. 33). Wherever possible, I have mentioned standard terminology inside the book to make Googling easier. At some future point I may compile a complete list for all the scientific references in Methods, but this has not yet been done.

CHAPTER 1
No science

CHAPTER 2
Conservation of Energy - Bad Science

quote:
You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy!
Not necessarily violating conservation of energy. Could be a very heavy cat. Or the mass energy turned into some other non-mass energy that you can't see. Etc.

The Hamiltonian and energy conservation - Bad Science

quote:
You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian!
Non energy conserving Hamiltonians can be computed just fine.

Unitary and the Hamiltonian - Bad Science

quote:
Rejecting [the quantum Hamiltonian] destroys unitarity
The Hamiltonian can be rejected while unitarity is maintained.

Faster than light signaling - Bad Science

quote:
and then [rejecting unitarity] you get FTL signalling
Faster than light signaling has nothing to do with this. Su3su2u1 has a good discussion on Chapter 2 overall:http://su3su2u1.tumblr.com/post/95953789878/chapter-2-in-which-i-remember-why-i-hated-this

CHAPTER 3
Bystander effect - Bad Science

quote:
The Dark Lord had raged upon wizarding Britain like a wilding wolf, tearing and rending at the fabric of their everyday lives. Other countries had wrung their hands but hesitated to intervene, whether out of apathetic selfishness or simple fear, for whichever was first among them to oppose the Dark Lord, their peace would be the next target of his terror.

(The bystander effect, thought Harry, thinking of Latane and Darley's experiment which had shown that you were more likely to get help if you had an epileptic fit in front of one person than in front of three. Diffusion of responsibility, everyone hoping that someone else would go first.)
Yes and no. Defined and example of original study noted correctly. Application of bystander effect to nation states rather than individuals is not good science.

CHAPTER 4
Seigniorage

quote:
And can anyone coin them, or are they issued by a monopoly that thereby collects seigniorage?
Yes. Defined.

Arbitrage and the Efficient Market Hypothesis

quote:
So not only is the wizarding economy almost completely decoupled from the Muggle economy, no one here has ever heard of arbitrage. The larger Muggle economy had a fluctuating trading range of gold to silver, so every time the Muggle gold-to-silver ratio got more than 5% away from the weight of seventeen Sickles to one Galleon, either gold or silver should have drained from the wizarding economy until it became impossible to maintain the exchange rate. Bring in a ton of silver, change to Sickles (and pay 5%), change the Sickles for Galleons, take the gold to the Muggle world, exchange it for more silver than you started with, and repeat.
Yes. Arbitrage is defined with example relative to the Efficient Market Hypothesis.

Fermi calculation

quote:
"It's a mathematical thing. Named after Enrico Fermi. A way of getting rough numbers quickly in your head..."

Twenty gold Galleons weighed a tenth of a kilogram, maybe? And gold was, what, ten thousand British pounds a kilogram? So a Galleon would be worth about fifty pounds... The mounds of gold coins looked to be about sixty coins high and twenty coins wide in either dimension of the base, and a mound was pyramidal, so it would be around one-third of the cube. Eight thousand Galleons per mound, roughly, and there were around five mounds of that size, so forty thousand Galleons or 2 million pounds sterling.

Yes. Defined with example

CHAPTER 5
Fundamental attribution error

quote:
the fundamental attribution error is that we explain by permanent, enduring traits what would be better explained by circumstance and context."
Yes. Defined with example

CHAPTER 6
Natural language understanding - Bad Science

quote:
How can [the bag of holding] know that 'bag of 115 Galleons' is okay but not 'bag of 90 plus 25 Galleons'? It can count but it can't add? It can understand nouns, but not some noun phrases that mean the same thing? The person who made this probably didn't speak Japanese and I don't speak any Hebrew, so it's not using their knowledge, and it's not using my knowledge -" Harry waved a hand helplessly. "The rules seem sorta consistent but they don't mean anything! I'm not even going to ask how a pouch ends up with voice recognition and natural language understanding
No. Bag does not demonstrate natural language understanding.

The planning fallacy - Bad Science

quote:
reality usually delivers results a little worse than the 'worst-case scenario'. It's called the planning fallacy
Yes and no. Defined correctly. Context example of McGonagall saying a first aid kit is unneeded is not actually an example of the planning fallacy, since no duration planning takes place.

Bayes' Theorem - Bad Science

quote:
Bayes's Theorem said that any reasonable hypothesis which made it more likely than a thousand-to-one that he'd end up with the brother to the Dark Lord's wand, was going to have an advantage.
Bayes' Theorem is the usual spelling for historical reasons. Use is otherwise unobjectionable.

CHAPTER 7
Naming schema - Bad Science

quote:
"I'll call you Mr. Silver."

"You get away from... from Mr. Gold," Ron said coldly, and took a forward step. "He doesn't need to talk to the likes of you!"

Harry raised a placating hand. "I'll go by Mr. Bronze, thanks for the naming schema.

Not actually a naming schema.

Reciprocation theory

quote:
My own books called it reciprocation and they talk about how giving someone a straight gift of two Sickles was found to be twice as effective as offering them twenty Sickles in getting them to do what you want

Yes. Defined with example.

CHAPTER 8
Quark Names - Bad Science

quote:
name the six quarks or tell me where to find Hermione Granger.

"Up, down, strange, charm, truth, beauty, and why are you looking for her?"
Top and bottom are the typical names for the quark pair, not truth and beauty.

Confirmation bias - Bad Science

quote:
"What you've just discovered is called 'positive bias'," said the boy. "You had a rule in your mind, and you kept on thinking of triplets that should make the rule say 'Yes'. But you didn't try to test any triplets that should make the rule say 'No'. In fact you didn't get a single 'No', so 'any three numbers' could have just as easily been the rule.
Textbook example of Confirmation Bias is given but inaccurately renamed 'Positive Bias' for unknown reasons. Moreover, the classic formation of confirmation bias has been generally disproven by more recent studies in favor of a more nuanced formulation, see Klayman and Ha or Caverni and Rossi.

Bystander apathy

quote:
I think there were some people in the crowd who wanted to interfere at first, but bystander apathy held them off at least until they saw what we were doing, and then I think they were all too confused to do anything.
Yes. Previously defined in bystander effect discussion from chapter 3.

Desensitisation therapy - Bad Science

quote:
[Harry, Fred, and George bullying Neville] Finally he said in this tiny little whisper 'go away' so the three of us all screamed and ran off, shrieking something about the light burning us. Hopefully he won't be as scared of being bullied in the future. That's called desensitisation therapy, by the way.

Desensitization therapy is the training of a practiced relaxation response in to a phobic stimulus and gradually increasing the stimulus hierarchy. The point of the therapy is to train a non-panic response to whatever the phobia. Scaring the crap out of someone isn't useful if they aren't trying to control themselves and train another reaction. Most charitably you might call this a sort of attempted classical conditioning. But really this is just bullying, plain and simple. British spelling used.

Consequentialism

quote:
That's called consequentialism, by the way, it means that whether an act is right or wrong isn't determined by whether it looks bad, or mean, or anything like that, the only question is how it will turn out in the end - what are the consequences
Yes defined and example given.

Bonus weirdness: Draco rape threats, Enlightenment culture superiority

We have made it through 14 chapters! Let us update the list:

CHAPTER 9
Speciation and hybrids - Bad Science

quote:

You can't just mix two different species together and get viable offspring! It ought to scramble the genetic instructions for every organ that's different between the two species

Hybrid speciation is a thing, most obviously in mules. Hybrids can even be sexually viable.

CHAPTER 10
No science. su3su2u1 makes an argument that blackmailing the sorting hat is nonsensical.

CHAPTER 11
No Science. Filler chapters

CHAPTER 12
Confirmation Bias - Bad Science

quote:

that meant that as soon as he learned a spell to temporarily alter his own sense of humor, he could make anything happen, by making it so that he would only find that one thing surprising enough to do a spit-take, and then drinking a can of Comed-Tea.

Harry appears to be suffering from confirmation bias in his 'experiments' with comed-tea. No experiments with negative outcomes have been done as Harry attempts to understand how Comed-tea works, despite lecturing Hermione on this very shortcoming in Chapter 8. Unclear if this is a literary device or otherwise intentional.

CHAPTER 13
No science. Assuming time travel self consistency mechanics to be magical and part of setting.

CHAPTER 14
Time-reversal and antimatter - Bad Science

quote:

time-reversed ordinary matter looks just like antimatter

Not strictly correct.
The Feynman-Stueckelberg Interpretation does posit that anti-matter can be viewed as time-reversed matter, su3su2u1 has a nice writeup. Generally this due to an underlying CP symmetry. Specifically, time reversal is implied by the underlying charge conjugation parity symmetry--matter and mirror-image (parity reversed) anti-matter should behave identically. CP symmetry appears to hold for the strong force, though exactly WHY remains an open problem.
However CP symmetry violations , and therefore time reversal violations, have been experimentally demonstrated in some kaons and muons, most notably in the Nobel winning work by Chronin and Fitch. The recent BaBar experiments clearly identify time reversal violations in B mesons and anti-B mesons. Given the CP violations at the electroweak scale and the open Strong CP problem, stating 'time-reversed ordinary matter looks just like antimatter' appears a pedantic excuse to showoff quantum dynamics and anti-matter explosion trivia and not strictly accurate.

Anti-matter explosions

quote:

one kilogram of antimatter encountering one kilogram of matter will annihilate in an explosion equivalent to 43 million tons of TNT

Yes. Expected yield per e=mc^2.

Explosion blast radius - Bad Science

quote:

I myself weigh 41 kilograms and that the resulting blast [of 41 kg of anti-matter] would leave A GIANT SMOKING CRATER WHERE THERE USED TO BE SCOTLAND

Decidedly exaggerated. Radius of an explosion goes by the fifth root of the energy of an explosion, as GI Taylor demonstrated analyzing the Trinity explosion. 1 kg of anti-matter exploding is roughly equivalent to the Tsar Bomba explosion, so 41 kg will have a blast radius a little more than twice as big. To first order this is a 7km fireball and a 70 radius of destruction. Scotland has an area of some 78,000 square km.

Anthropic principle - Bad Science

quote:

"And it doesn't, say, create a paradox that destroys the universe."

She smiled tolerantly. "Mr. Potter, I think I'd remember hearing if that had ever happened."

"THAT IS NOT REASSURING! HAVEN'T YOU PEOPLE EVER HEARD OF THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE?

Selection bias is more appropriate, in recent years the strong and weak anthropic principles have become conflated and people continue to redefine the anthropic principle as they see fit. McGonagall's reasoning that timeturners have been safely used in the past should be reassuring.

Turing Computability - Bad Science

quote:

You know right up until this moment I had this awful suppressed thought somewhere in the back of my mind that the only remaining answer was that my whole universe was a computer simulation like in the book Simulacron 3 but now even that is ruled out because this little toy ISN'T TURING COMPUTABLE!

Reality can still be simulated on a computer in a universe with self consistent time travel, as Yud himself points out.

Confirmation Bias - Bad Science

quote:

"SO THAT'S HOW THE COMED-TEA WORKS! Of course! The spell doesn't force funny events to happen, it just makes you feel an impulse to drink right before funny things are going to happen anyway

Harry still appears to be suffering from confirmation bias in his 'experiments' with comed-tea. No experiments with negative outcomes have been done as Harry attempts to understand how Comed-tea works despite lecturing Hermione on this very shortcoming in Chapter 8. Remains unclear if this is a literary device or otherwise intentional. Harry's theories of timetravel mechanics are also not tested.

Still not good for Yud/Harry. Looking worse than before!

Bonus weirdness: Oriental wise man stereotypes

Edited for formatting, antimatter discussion and quotes

i81icu812 fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Sep 1, 2015

# ¿ Aug 29, 2015 00:51

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Tunicate posted:

quote:
Chapter 14
Time reversed matter is equivalent to anti-matter - Yes. Physics is correct.
Not accurate, as we've known about CP violations since 1964. Cronin and Fitch won a Nobel for it.

True.

Yeah, due to the CP violations as discussed in the above link this is unlikely to be more than a mathematical oddity and an historical footnote. But the strong CP problem remains unsolved. Hmm.

Text is 'time-reversed ordinary matter looks just like antimatter'

I guess it comes down to how pedantic you want to be about defining 'ordinary matter'?

Also, it was the sole correct use of science in the preceding 6 chapters!

# ¿ Aug 29, 2015 04:37

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Liquid Communism posted:

And an even more limited pool of decent editors willing to do work for the pay that a fanfic author can give them (ie nothing).

Let's be honest, even when people like su3 provide editing and science fact checking for free out of a compulsion to correct science errors most fanfic writers don't want the help. Yud is hardly alone in this failing.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2015 03:54

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

divabot posted:

The Reddit thread meltdown continues, on Tumblr. nostalgebraist sums up the problem. Do click on all the "reblogged this from" below with comments, there's a fascinating conversation going on there. (I post here with stuff I said in this thread.) The disappointed cultists are particularly delicious, e.g. this one lamenting that Yudkowsky has strayed from Yudkowsky's path.

Want to see a real meltdown? Link this post!

Elizer Yudkowsky posted:

All science mentioned in Methods is standard science except where otherwise specified (IIRC, the only two uses of nonstandard theories are Barbour�s timeless physics in Ch. 28 and my own timeless decision theory in Ch. 33). Wherever possible, I have mentioned standard terminology inside the book to make Googling easier. At some future point I may compile a complete list for all the scientific references in Methods, but this has not yet been done.

CHAPTER 1
No science

CHAPTER 2
Conservation of Energy - Bad Science

quote:

You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy!

Not necessarily violating conservation of energy. Could be a very heavy cat. Or the mass energy turned into some other non-mass energy that you can't see. Etc.

The Hamiltonian and energy conservation - Bad Science

quote:

You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian!

Non energy conserving Hamiltonians can be computed just fine.

Unitary and the Hamiltonian - Bad Science

quote:

Rejecting [the quantum Hamiltonian] destroys unitarity

The Hamiltonian can be rejected while unitarity is maintained.

Faster than light signaling - Bad Science

quote:

and then [rejecting unitarity] you get FTL signalling

Faster than light signaling has nothing to do with this. Su3su2u1 has a good discussion on Chapter 2 overall:http://su3su2u1.tumblr.com/post/95953789878/chapter-2-in-which-i-remember-why-i-hated-this

CHAPTER 3
Bystander effect - Bad Science

quote:

The Dark Lord had raged upon wizarding Britain like a wilding wolf, tearing and rending at the fabric of their everyday lives. Other countries had wrung their hands but hesitated to intervene, whether out of apathetic selfishness or simple fear, for whichever was first among them to oppose the Dark Lord, their peace would be the next target of his terror.

(The bystander effect, thought Harry, thinking of Latane and Darley's experiment which had shown that you were more likely to get help if you had an epileptic fit in front of one person than in front of three. Diffusion of responsibility, everyone hoping that someone else would go first.)

Yes and no. Defined and example of original study noted correctly. Application of bystander effect to nation states rather than individuals is not good science.

CHAPTER 4
Seigniorage

quote:

And can anyone coin them, or are they issued by a monopoly that thereby collects seigniorage?

Yes. Defined.

Arbitrage and the Efficient Market Hypothesis

quote:

So not only is the wizarding economy almost completely decoupled from the Muggle economy, no one here has ever heard of arbitrage. The larger Muggle economy had a fluctuating trading range of gold to silver, so every time the Muggle gold-to-silver ratio got more than 5% away from the weight of seventeen Sickles to one Galleon, either gold or silver should have drained from the wizarding economy until it became impossible to maintain the exchange rate. Bring in a ton of silver, change to Sickles (and pay 5%), change the Sickles for Galleons, take the gold to the Muggle world, exchange it for more silver than you started with, and repeat.

Yes. Arbitrage is defined with example relative to the Efficient Market Hypothesis.

Fermi calculation

quote:

"It's a mathematical thing. Named after Enrico Fermi. A way of getting rough numbers quickly in your head..."

Twenty gold Galleons weighed a tenth of a kilogram, maybe? And gold was, what, ten thousand British pounds a kilogram? So a Galleon would be worth about fifty pounds... The mounds of gold coins looked to be about sixty coins high and twenty coins wide in either dimension of the base, and a mound was pyramidal, so it would be around one-third of the cube. Eight thousand Galleons per mound, roughly, and there were around five mounds of that size, so forty thousand Galleons or 2 million pounds sterling.

Yes. Defined with example

CHAPTER 5
Fundamental Attribution Error - Bad Science

quote:

"Suppose you come into work and see your colleague kicking his desk. You think, 'what an angry person he must be'. Your colleague is thinking about how someone bumped him into a wall on the way to work and then shouted at him. Anyone would be angry at that, he thinks. When we look at others we see personality traits that explain their behaviour, but when we look at ourselves we see circumstances that explain our behaviour. People's stories make internal sense to them, from the inside, but we don't see people's histories trailing behind them in the air. We only see them in one situation, and we don't see what they would be like in a different situation. So the fundamental attribution error is that we explain by permanent, enduring traits what would be better explained by circumstance and context."

Example given is correct. However the definition is better stated as 'fundamental attribution error is that we explain in others by permanent, enduring traits what would be better explained by circumstance and context'. Thanks Cingulate.

CHAPTER 6
Natural language understanding - Bad Science

quote:

How can [the bag of holding] know that 'bag of 115 Galleons' is okay but not 'bag of 90 plus 25 Galleons'? It can count but it can't add? It can understand nouns, but not some noun phrases that mean the same thing? The person who made this probably didn't speak Japanese and I don't speak any Hebrew, so it's not using their knowledge, and it's not using my knowledge -" Harry waved a hand helplessly. "The rules seem sorta consistent but they don't mean anything! I'm not even going to ask how a pouch ends up with voice recognition and natural language understanding

No. Bag does not demonstrate natural language understanding.

The planning fallacy - Bad Science

quote:

reality usually delivers results a little worse than the 'worst-case scenario'. It's called the planning fallacy

Yes and no. Defined correctly. Context example of McGonagall saying a first aid kit is unneeded is not actually an example of the planning fallacy, since no duration planning takes place.

Bayes' Theorem - Bad Science

quote:

"It is very curious indeed that you should be destined for this wand when its brother why, its brother gave you that scar."

That could not possibly be coincidence. There had been thousands of wands in that shop. Well, okay, actually it could be coincidence, there were six billion people in the world and thousand-to-one coincidences happened every day. But Bayes's Theorem said that any reasonable hypothesis which made it more likely than a thousand-to-one that he'd end up with the brother to the Dark Lord's wand, was going to have an advantage.

Bayes' Theorem is the usual spelling for historical reasons. Use of Bayes's Theorem is unclear and potentially misleading to reader unfamiliar with definition. Thanks Cingulate.

CHAPTER 7
Naming schema - Bad Science

quote:

"I'll call you Mr. Silver."

"You get away from... from Mr. Gold," Ron said coldly, and took a forward step. "He doesn't need to talk to the likes of you!"

Harry raised a placating hand. "I'll go by Mr. Bronze, thanks for the naming schema.

Not actually a naming schema.

Reciprocation theory

quote:

My own books called it reciprocation and they talk about how giving someone a straight gift of two Sickles was found to be twice as effective as offering them twenty Sickles in getting them to do what you want

Yes. Defined with example.

CHAPTER 8
Quark Names - Bad Science

quote:

name the six quarks or tell me where to find Hermione Granger.

"Up, down, strange, charm, truth, beauty, and why are you looking for her?"

Top and bottom are the typical names for the final quark pair, not truth and beauty.

Confirmation bias - Bad Science

quote:

"What you've just discovered is called 'positive bias'," said the boy. "You had a rule in your mind, and you kept on thinking of triplets that should make the rule say 'Yes'. But you didn't try to test any triplets that should make the rule say 'No'. In fact you didn't get a single 'No', so 'any three numbers' could have just as easily been the rule.

Textbook example of Confirmation Bias is given but inaccurately renamed 'Positive Bias' for unknown reasons. Moreover, the classic formation of confirmation bias has been generally disproven by more recent studies in favor of a more nuanced formulation, see Klayman and Ha or Caverni and Rossi.

Bystander apathy

quote:

I think there were some people in the crowd who wanted to interfere at first, but bystander apathy held them off at least until they saw what we were doing, and then I think they were all too confused to do anything.

Yes. Previously defined in bystander effect discussion from chapter 3.

Desensitisation therapy - Bad Science

quote:

[Harry, Fred, and George bullying Neville] Finally he said in this tiny little whisper 'go away' so the three of us all screamed and ran off, shrieking something about the light burning us. Hopefully he won't be as scared of being bullied in the future. That's called desensitisation therapy, by the way.

Desensitization therapy is the training of a practiced relaxation response in to a phobic stimulus and gradually increasing the stimulus hierarchy. The point of the therapy is to train a non-panic response to the stimulus. Scaring the crap out of someone isn't useful if they aren't trying to control themselves and train another reaction. Most charitably you might call this a sort of attempted classical conditioning. But really this is just bullying, plain and simple.

Consequentialism

quote:

That's called consequentialism, by the way, it means that whether an act is right or wrong isn't determined by whether it looks bad, or mean, or anything like that, the only question is how it will turn out in the end - what are the consequences

Yes defined and example given.

CHAPTER 9
Speciation and hybrids - Bad Science

quote:

You can't just mix two different species together and get viable offspring! It ought to scramble the genetic instructions for every organ that's different between the two species

quote:

that meant that as soon as he learned a spell to temporarily alter his own sense of humor, he could make anything happen, by making it so that he would only find that one thing surprising enough to do a spit-take, and then drinking a can of Comed-Tea.

quote:

time-reversed ordinary matter looks just like antimatter

Not strictly correct.
The Feynman-Stueckelberg Interpretation does posit that anti-matter can be viewed as time-reversed matter, su3su2u1 has a nice writeup. Generally this due to an underlying CP symmetry. Specifically, time reversal is implied by the underlying charge conjugation parity symmetry--matter and mirror-image (parity reversed) anti-matter should behave identically. CP symmetry appears to hold for the strong force, though exactly WHY remains an open problem.
However CP symmetry violations , and therefore time reversal violations, have been experimentally demonstrated in some kaons and mesons, most notably in the Nobel winning work by Cronin and Fitch. The recent BaBar experiments clearly identify time reversal violations in B mesons and anti-B mesons. Given the CP violations at the electroweak scale and the open Strong CP problem, stating 'time-reversed ordinary matter looks just like antimatter' appears a pedantic excuse to showoff quantum dynamics and anti-matter explosion trivia is not strictly accurate.

Anti-matter explosions - Bad Science

quote:

one kilogram of antimatter encountering one kilogram of matter will annihilate in an explosion equivalent to 43 million tons of TNT

It is true that the energy released from the annihilation of 1kg anti-matter with 1 kg of matter is given by E=mc^2 = 180 petaJoules = 43 megatons TNT equivalent. However, the effect of the actual annihilation explosion will be roughly half the size of 43 million tons TNT exploding, because roughly half of the energy from the anti-matter explosion will be transferred to harmless neutrinos. While electron-positron annihilation does convert the electron/positron mass in gamma rays (well most of the time), most of the mass in the anti-matter consists of anti-neutrons and anti-proton which complicated annihilation reactions producing a delightful variety of subatomic particles and transferring roughly half the annihilation explosion energy to neutrinos, which harmlessly pass through the earth without interacting with anything. A wonderful paper by Borowski examines this in detail analyzing antimatter a potential spaceship fuel.

Explosion blast radius - Bad Science

quote:

I myself weigh 41 kilograms and that the resulting blast [of 41 kg of anti-matter] would leave A GIANT SMOKING CRATER WHERE THERE USED TO BE SCOTLAND

Decidedly exaggerated. Radius of an explosion goes by the fifth root of the energy of an explosion, as G.I. Taylor demonstrated analyzing the Trinity explosion. 1 kg of anti-matter exploding is roughly equivalent to half of the Tsar Bomba explosion, so 41 kg will have a blast radius a little more than twice as wide as Tsar Bomba. To first order this is a 7km fireball and a 70km radius of destruction. Scotland has an area of some 78,000 square km. Note that using 43 Mtons-TNT-equivalent instead of the correct 21.5 Mtons-TNT-equivalent results in just a 14% increase in the expected explosion size.

Anthropic principle - Bad Science

quote:

"And it doesn't, say, create a paradox that destroys the universe."

She smiled tolerantly. "Mr. Potter, I think I'd remember hearing if that had ever happened."

"THAT IS NOT REASSURING! HAVEN'T YOU PEOPLE EVER HEARD OF THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE?

quote:

You know right up until this moment I had this awful suppressed thought somewhere in the back of my mind that the only remaining answer was that my whole universe was a computer simulation like in the book Simulacron 3 but now even that is ruled out because this little toy ISN'T TURING COMPUTABLE!

Reality can still be simulated on a computer in a universe with self consistent time travel, as Yud himself points out.

Confirmation Bias - Bad Science

quote:

"SO THAT'S HOW THE COMED-TEA WORKS! Of course! The spell doesn't force funny events to happen, it just makes you feel an impulse to drink right before funny things are going to happen anyway

Harry still appears to be suffering from confirmation bias in his 'experiments' with comed-tea. No experiments with negative outcomes have been done as Harry attempts to understand how Comed-tea works despite lecturing Hermione on this very shortcoming in Chapter 8. Remains unclear if this is a literary device or otherwise intentional. Harry's theories of timetravel mechanics are also not tested.

Through Chapter 14: 7/27

EDIT: Updates thanks to Cingulate and Turnicate

i81icu812 fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Jan 5, 2017

# ¿ Sep 1, 2015 15:49

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Tunicate posted:

quote:
one kilogram of antimatter encountering one kilogram of matter will annihilate in an explosion equivalent to 43 million tons of TNT
Doublecheck that - antimatter detonations lose half the energy to neutrinos.

Good catch!

You're right, we can't treat that as a simple electron - positron annihilation. A lot of that energy becomes harmless neutrinos. Strictly speaking the energy released is 43 Mtons TNT equivalent, but the actual equivalent explosion effectively halved due to the neutrinos released.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1v1783/would_matterantimatter_annihilation_be_any/

And a fascinating 100 page paper on the weirdness of N-anti-N annihilation http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ex/0501020v1.pdf

As before, in the spirit of nitpicking any and all corrections, comments, and criticism is welcome.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2015 02:26

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Cingulate posted:

You're too nice on a few of these.
To be precise, it is disproportionally blaming OTHER'S behavior on inherent traits rather than circumstance. In contrast, we famously tend to blame our own failings disproportionally on circumstance rather than traits, so saying "we blame stuff on trait rather than circumstance" is getting it about as right as wrong.
Bayes' Theorem describes how we distribute credibility between hypotheses. It says nothing about "reasonable", it does not assign any special importance to "1000 to 1", and it doesn't say anything about what to do with credibility post assignment.
Literally: P(H|D) = P(H) * P(D|H) / P(D)
You can inform a decision rule via Bayes' Theorem, but much of the actual work is still to be done then (e.g., constructing a loss function).

I have no idea about physics.

Possibly I am being too nice. The section of the fundamental attribution error did give a proper example that I didn't quote even if the definition was wrong.

Likewise for Bayes'. The expanded quote has more background that generally makes it somewhat better and explains the '1000 to 1'. It's still not good. But better. I've updated both quotes.

I am going through this along with our esteemed guide and host JWKS, so I haven't gotten to the later sections. I do appreciate any and all contributions, but I'll probably refrain from updating the list till the thread gets there.

Also I would note there hasn't been any science correctly used since Chapter 8. And there have been zero instances of unambiguously correct hard science in the first 14 chapters. Overall Yud is batting 7/27.

i81icu812 fucked around with this message at 03:37 on Sep 2, 2015

# ¿ Sep 2, 2015 03:10

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

So this section is frustrating. This is the first real magic-as-science-opportunity in the story! Opportunity to establish and explore rules to examine in interesting ways! But the execution is just so bad. Let's look at the science here, such as it is.

Thing are transfigured into other things with roughly the same volume (desk-pig, block of wood-cup of water, canon books)
Transfiguring a bunch of loosely packed molecules to tightly packed molecules and vice versa does not result in an explosion or implosion from steric mismatches or other molecular forces

Unfortunately we don't have a mapping of how one chunk of anything transfigures into a chunk of anything else. One for one molecule swap? A scaled duplicate copy of the original? A brand new copy each time the transfigured item splits? Of course there's no conservation laws that are being followed that we know of, so the mapping is tricky. Would be fun for an author to explore! Unfortunately, Yud's examples are terrible.

Under the assumption that transfiguration replaces molecules one for one, let's look at drinking a glass of something transfigured. Water will be absorbed into your bloodstream within minutes of drinking, and will persist in your body over the course of a couple of weeks. A single 200mL glass of water is a fraction of a percent of the overall water volume of a person and will rapidly diffuse throughout your body and into your cells.

So what happens if the water suddenly transformed into wood? Assuming magic smooths over the transition effects, and that the water molecules transform into individual molecules of wood, you will probably be fine. Wood is organic, mostly long chains of polysaccharides that are present in your cells anyway, and can be easily broken down by your cells.

How about gold? Again, assuming magic smooths over the transition and you get individual molecular replacement you'll likely be okay. Gold is a noble metal and is inert to most chemical reactions. Atomic gold will not react with the hydrochloric acid in your stomach or with anything else in your digestive system and is a FDA approved safe food additive. Water chemistry is not exactly my specialty, but I'm fairly sure that atomic gold will be more or less ignored by your body in small doses like this.

Let's say I'm wrong. Worst case is that the gold somehow ionizes in your body and you now have a bunch of gold ions in your blood. In all likelihood the percursers for the the gold ions were also toxic and liable to kill you (fun stuff like aqua regia, rubidium, cesium, or potassium cyanide). However if your only problem is gold ions (say you drank a solution of ionic gold chloride transfigured into water) you are now poisoned by the gold ions moving in and reacting with your blood/cells and will suffer hyperacute liver and kidney failure in short order. While you will suffer jaundice and skin discoloration, you will also likely NOT be screaming out pain, or suffering overly much from pain at all. If anything you'll be too weak for much screaming. Or in a coma.

Since Yud is making up the rules of transfiguration magic, I'm sure there is some way to ensure that drinking a glass of wood or gold could be made to kill you. But there just isn't enough here to actually understand the system to assess this passage. Or make any remarks about science at all. What is there to notate, that water diffuses through your blood into your cells?

Of course I'm sure this will be revisited in a later section and be better fleshed out...........

i81icu812 fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Sep 4, 2015

# ¿ Sep 3, 2015 02:46

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

JosephWongKS posted:

Chapter 15: Conscientiousness
Part Five

If Transfiguration is truly that dangerous in this world, why would you even teach Transfiguration to children? You can give them all the sternly worded warnings you like, but they are still, you know, children. Driving is far less dangerous than Eliezer�s take on Transfiguration but we still don�t let little kids drive.

Does this include precious metals like gold and silver, or other valuables like gemstones?

Transfiguration examined in detail is always going to be problematic. If it's effects are permanent, then a whole bunch of rules need to be made up for the economy to make sense. If transfiguration is NOT permanent, anything you eat or drink is a potential deadly poison and wizards should be paranoid murderers.

quote:

McGonagall has just doomed one or more of her students. Chekov�s Gun all but demands that one of them will transfigure himself or herself.

Like Yud has the attention for foreshadowing. Or remembering plot points.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2015 21:12

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

The real problem is that Yud's examples suck. If he just picked something clearly poisonous like a block of lead for his example, the point would have been made and the victim would be clearly dead regardless of how transfiguration works. There's plenty of interesting ideas that non-permanent transfiguration bring up for a competent author to explore. Treating transfiguration and magic in general rigorously, instead of as a plot device like Rowling, did could be fun.

Yud explaining how the hell transfiguration transformations map would be nice, but I guess exploring the details of magic as science is not in the cards for this fanfic.

i81icu812 fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Sep 5, 2015

# ¿ Sep 5, 2015 19:43

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

JosephWongKS posted:

Chapter 15: Conscientiousness
Part Seven

quote:
"Yes, Mr. Potter?"

"Is it possible to Transfigure a living subject into a target that is static, such as a coin - no, excuse me, I'm terribly sorry, let's just say a steel ball."

Professor McGonagall shook her head. "Mr. Potter, even inanimate objects undergo small internal changes over time. There would be no visible changes to your body afterwards, and for the first minute, you would notice nothing wrong. But in an hour you would be sick, and in a day you would be dead."

People have survived cancerous tumours, literal bullet holes through their heads, internal damage caused by accidental or deliberate crushing, and other forms of massive physical trauma. What kind of �small internal changes� undergone by a steel ball could exceed the impact of internal cancers and external wounds?

While the logic of transfiguration being a deadly killing spell and how the hell any of this works still makes no sense, I must commend Yud for the bolded section. 15 chapters and several tens of thousands of words in and we have found the first unambiguously correct hard science reference. Solids, even homogenous solids, are not nearly as solid as you might think, between dislocations on the macrolevel and atomic diffusion on the individual atomic level.

Why these changes should result in someone dying afterwards makes zero sense and is almost indubitably never explained, but yud did manage to finally get a bit of chemistry correct. Still batting around 8 for 28.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2015 06:15

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

chessmaster13 posted:

After all, authors have to have a degree of freedom to bring the story forward.
It starts to become a problem when the author states "everything here makes sense!!".
The moment you announce this people will start the bug hunt and they will find everything you didn't want them to find.
And dismissing it will not be sufficient to calm the angry and unwashed masses.

quote:

Elizer Yudkowsky posted:

All science mentioned in Methods is standard science except where otherwise specified (IIRC, the only two uses of nonstandard theories are Barbour�s timeless physics in Ch. 28 and my own timeless decision theory in Ch. 33). Wherever possible, I have mentioned standard terminology inside the book to make Googling easier. At some future point I may compile a complete list for all the scientific references in Methods, but this has not yet been done.

Yeah, pretty much. I would've been bored and dismissed this a bad fanfiction ages ago otherwise.

Though Yud never dismissed or backed down from his statement that 'all science is standard science' and therefore correct. Unless I missed something, And there is a fair bit evidence he is dead wrong now!

# ¿ Sep 12, 2015 17:27

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

This chapter is a series of bizarre tone shifts, one after another. This contest and McGonagall's reaction is completely inane.

McGonagall maintains no consistency from chapter to chapter.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2015 05:36

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Rowling was abysmal at making spell names, fanfic authors can't possibly do worse than the source material did.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2015 00:46

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

MikeJF posted:

Who actually has a book with the first ten thousand primes listed. Who would print a book with ten thousand primes. There's zero use to that. Any real use for that information would be computerised.

Mathematicians considered computing lists and tables of primes a thing, before the advent of computers. D. N. Lehmer published the descriptively titled List of Prime Numbers from 1 to 10,006,721 in 1914 and it got a couple of reprintings so these books do exist. You can even buy a copy from amazon: http://www.amazon.com/List-Prime-Numbers-006-721/dp/B001JY8PGC!

However, neither of the most common engineering reference books, Pocket Ref or Machinery's Handbook, have tables of the first 10,000 primes alongside the trig and log tables. It's possible some of the old engineering or mathematics reference books might, but I don't have a full library to look at and check at the moment.

Also it is possible that Yud misremembered the D. N. Lehmer book as ten thousand rather than ten million or something.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2015 01:57

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

The thematic whiplash seems really inappropriate here. Is McGonagall concerned about student safety or is she a corrupt bureaucrat who doesn't care? You can't have it both ways in the same conversation.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2015 08:23

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Hyper Crab Tank posted:

The greatest tragedy of HPMOR is easily that Yudkowsky is, at the end of the day, not the worst writer of prose out there and all that overflowing enthusiasm could, if he had been more inclined to it and less insane, been channelled into something of actual acceptable quality, and I don't even think he would have to compromise on the science stuff if he really wanted to. Would help if it was more accurate and less, y'know, mad futurist.

Yud's science is absolutely terrible. Abysmally, utterly awful. He just has the nerve to claim 'all science method is standard science', and doesn't bother to fix anything ever.

At last count through chapter 14, Yud was batting 7/27 in general science references, and managed to get every single hard science reference wrong. I think Yud got one right in chapter 15 and then decides to stop making science references for a long time.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2015 10:40

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Nessus posted:

And clearly have nothing to do with one's whiteness or whatever, given all the non-white wizardlings running round. If someone wanted to try to model how magi-genes work based on the evidence in the books I suppose that would be harmless fan nerding.

Someone has! http://web.archive.org/web/20150326...laining-how-the

Basically the most plausible way for a genetic component to make any sense. Rowling should really have left magic as magic and not pulled a George Lucas, but genes are a lot better than midiclorians.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2016 01:04

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Darth Walrus posted:

Did she pull a George Lucas, though? I never kept up with her comments as an author, but the books themselves consistently defied that line of reasoning where magic was concerned.

I guess you can argue she did better than Lucas by restricting her genetics comments to her website and various interviews?

Tunicate posted:

Rowling's statements about this, from a fan site that collected them

Wizarding Genetics: More Complicated Than Mendel!

�A Squib is almost the opposite of a Muggle-born wizard: he or she is a non-magical person born to at least one magical parent. Squibs are rare; magic is a dominant and resilient gene.� � jkrowling.com

�How does a Muggle-born like Hermione develop magical abilities?�

�Nobody knows where magic comes from. It is like any other talent. Sometimes it seems to be inherited, but others are the only ones in their family who have the ability.� � Barnes and Noble interview, March 19, 1999

�How can two Muggles have a kid with magical powers?�

�It's the same as two black-haired people producing a redheaded child. Sometimes these things just happen, and no one really knows why!� � Online chat transcript, Scholastic.com, 3 February 2000

Magical inheritance as described in the books is clearly not Mendelian and requires either some sort of Trinucleotide repeat mutation mechanism or a more complicated multiple gene interaction as described on sugarquil. Either way requires more than a few hoops to jump through, and Rowling would have been better off saying 'its magic!' and leaving it at that.

Also red hair does not work that way! :bahgawd:

Don't worry, you can rest assured that Yud deals with magical genetics in the ~~best, most logically consistent~~ stupidest way possible when we finally revisit that plot point in 50 chapters.

i81icu812 fucked around with this message at 10:06 on Jan 10, 2016

# ¿ Jan 10, 2016 04:25

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

NihilCredo posted:

That reminds me, he said he'd wait a year between finishing the series and writing the "X-Years-After" Epilogue, in order to let people write their own continuation fanfictions. We're pretty close to a year since HPMOR finished, aren't we?

Oh god. Have people actually been producing hpmor continuation fanfics?

# ¿ Jan 10, 2016 15:24

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Tunicate posted:

She also said that before Slytherin started being a racist fucker, muggleborns had a reputation of being magically stronger.

I like that pottermore is confined to one website where I can ignore the stupid bits and the contents are not jammed into extended cut special edition reprinted books.

quote:

Eugenics-wise, therefore, a rational person would want to kill off all the purebloods, probably. Rational means murderous, right?

Is this Yud-flavored rationalism we are talking about? Because murder isn't that big of a jump from torture... http://lesswrong.com/lw/kn/torture_vs_dust_specks/

# ¿ Jan 12, 2016 02:16

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Tunicate posted:

Now that JKR has confirmed that she loves making sports fans upset with quidditch, I consider pottermore to be JKR's personal trolling outlet.

Like, did you know that before muggles invented the toilet, wizards would just piss against the wall and then magically clean it up?

I am increasingly convinced that trolling readers is a primary reason Rowling created Pottermore.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2016 07:33

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Pavlov posted:

Tank I think you're underestimating how easy it is to look back on earlier sections of your work and manufacture 'foreshadowing' by deciding to make off hand remarks suddenly plot important.

Yud is just following the grand tradition of all serially published writers, notably including one J K Rowling.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2016 22:32

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

i81icu812 posted:

In 88 days we've gone through 12 chapters out of 122 total chapters. At this rate we can look forward to completion on Oct 30, 2017.

In 625 days we've gone through 18 chapters out of 122 total chapters. At this rate we can look forward to completion on March 4, 2029.

JosephWongKS, don't think you can get off the hook that easily!

# ¿ Nov 8, 2016 04:52

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Stanfield posted:

I don't suppose the fact that Harry's theory in section is demonstrably false ever causes him any problems down the line?

yeah you should really look at the Mendelian genetics section in detail

happy to see this alive again. ill update the science fact check post at some point

i81icu812 fucked around with this message at 10:58 on Jan 4, 2017

# ¿ Jan 4, 2017 10:56

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

Red Mike posted:

e: also your skipping of random bits of text make it really hard to follow the text, as someone who's sadly read it before but luckily long enough ago that he's forgotten the majority of it.

Yeah, I'm also having a hard time following this with the amount of text skipped, as much as I appreciate this coming back from the dead.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2017 11:39

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 13:51

i81icu812: Dec 5, 2006

The biggest problem is that if the magic gene is recessive then squibs are impossible for two magical parents. This implication should be important and and obvious but is never addressed.

The other issue this raises, as you note, is that all muggleborns have two squib parents, which raises population genetics issues or is the product of some seriously weird artificial behavior.

i81icu812 fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Jan 5, 2017

# ¿ Jan 5, 2017 01:41

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Let's Read: "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"

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